Beautify Your Photos With Intensify For Mac

Here at BP, we like creating beautiful pixels as much as we like consuming them. We do it by bringing you this site, working on the new “BP 5.0” design that we’ll be launching soon, telling you the stories of our lives, the apps, their designers and developers, striving to upgrade your technology experience. We are writers, designers, developers and yes, photographers. Because what better way to generate some beautiful pixels than to just click the world that we see around us, at the right angle, the right time, with just the right lighting and of course, the right equipment.

You know where I’m heading here. As awesome as a medium photography is for expressing emotions, it is still a bit hard to get right. Yes, you get better with time, but at the beginning you need a little push. And for that we have the photo editing/enhancement software suites.

Joining the Photoshops and Apertures of the world is Intensify for Mac. A $19.99 app whose sole aim is to make the process of enhancing your photos as simple as possible. To test the claim I went up to the roof and snapped a pic with my Nikon D3200 just as the sun was about to go out. The lighting wasn’t perfect, the flash was off and the camera was in auto mode.

I imported the RAW file into Intensify and started playing around. In less than 5 minutes, I had something I was genuinely proud of. Something I couldn’t achieve in iPhoto and something I didn’t have enough skills to achieve in Pro apps like Photoshop or Aperture. Intensify comes with more than a dozen filters for every scene imaginable. If you want to enhance a picture overall, just use the Universal Enhancement and Quick Image Fix filters.

You can also take the matter (brush) into your own hands and start tweaking stuff manually. Use the brush to select the area you want and from the sidebar apply a filter or go to the Adjust panel and start messing about with the nitty-gritty details like exposure, temperature, contrast, shadows, highlights and a lot more. If something goes wrong, you can just undo the change or take the eraser tool and erase the changes altogether. Intensify takes a “layered” approach to image editing. So your original image is always present underneath all your edits. And just like a layer in PS, you can turn down the opacity to get closer to the original image. When I used the brush mode and started to enhance the low light areas with shadows and temperature metrics, I got amazing details that I never knew were there. When enhancing the image, Intensify stays true to the original colors, and that adds the “breathtaking” effect to your image.

Intensify offers some tutorials on their website, but I decided to dive in head first because the most important thing in a photo editor is ease of use and here, Intensify passes with flying colors. There’s also a Pro app that you can download from the site which has features they couldn’t put in the Mac App Store version. The $59.99 app gets you plug-ins for apps like Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, Aperture and Lightroom to integrate Intensify functionality inside those apps. The upgrade also has support for PSDs (useful for people who don’t want to use Photoshop but have to deal with PSDs every now and then), more shortcuts for an improved workflow and additional functionality for filters and some improvements in navigation.

If you are a beginner like me, who just needs an easier way of enhancing sub quality images or to bring out the awesomeness in high quality images, give Intensify a try. It might not give you as much control over the editing process as the other Pro apps, but rest assured, you’ll get what you’re after, which is a better, more life like image. Intensify is available on the Mac App Store for $19.99 and you can download a trial of Intensify Pro from MacPhun’s website.